Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Science Fiction & Fantasy

Reviewers and critics have not always agreed on how well the science fiction label fit Ray Bradbury, but the immense popularity of works like The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man leaves no doubt as to the enduring status of this important writer. This Critical Companion examines, in a Literary Heritage chapter, the situation of Bradbury's works within the science fiction genre and explores thematic concerns that set works like Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine apart from conventional popular SF writings. This introduction to Bradbury, written...

Since the publication of his first short stories in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut has enjoyed much popular acclaim and has, since the 1970s, gained growing amounts of attention from the scholarly community. In the course of his career, he has become increasingly concerned with visual images. While such imagery occurs in his short fiction and novels, he has also written plays, in which ideas are visually represented on the stage. In recent years, he has devoted more and more of his time and energy to graphic art, producing paintings that are then silk screened. The contributors to this volume...

Transrealist writing treats immediate perceptions in a fantastic way, according to science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker, who originated the term. In the expanded sense argued in this book, it also intensifies imaginative fiction by writing the fantastic from the standpoint of richly personalized experience. Transrealism is also related to slipstream writing, another category introduced into studies of speculative fiction to account for texts that seem to follow trajectories mapped by the huge body of science fiction accumulated in the last century, while retaining a central...

Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert remain two of the most popular and influential science fiction writers of the 20th century. Each is a master structuralist whose works succeed in large part through the careful mirroring of concepts at every narrative level. While the fiction of Herbert and Asimov has attracted scholarly attention, science itself is a crucial element that is almost completely ignored in critical assessments of science fiction as literature. Because the works of Asimov and Herbert are grounded in scientific premises, an appreciation of their literary structure depends on an...

Best known today as the author of "Dracula, " Bram Stoker also wrote several other works, including "The Jewel of Seven Stars, Lady Athlyne, " and "The Lair of the White Worm." In his exploration of supernatural subjects, such as vampirism, he is clearly a Gothic writer. The fantastic elements of his novels seem very much at odds with the world of science. Stoker, nonetheless, draws upon a large body of scientific theory and technological innovation throughout his writings. This book studies his blending of Gothic subjects with emerging discoveries in science and technology.

The volume...

The 19th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was focused on the centennial of the initial publication of H. G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds." Wells's first and fourth novels, "The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds," have together largely created the science fiction genre and are arguably the two most influential works of science fiction. But through his works Wells has had an even broader influence on the fantastic, and numerous writers, artists, and musicians are indebted to him. This volume includes selected essays from the 19th annual ICFA and gives special...

A pioneering scholarly examination of the rich and fascinating fields of science fiction and fantasy art, this book stimulates scholarly interest in these areas by offering both surveys of the entire history of these traditions and focused examinations of particular genres and artists. In contrast to existing studies of science fiction and fantasy art, this volume argues that the subject needs to be explored within different contexts, such as literary history, art history, and cultural history. In addition, it maintains that certain trends should be followed across the field, such as art...

With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes where Napoleon was triumphant at Waterloo or the South won the Civil War. Writers ranging from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Philip K. Dick and Martin Amis have probed into the workings of time, and an overwhelming desire to master time reverberates throughout popular culture. This book considers how imaginative works involving time...

The 1950s are widely regarded as the golden age of American science fiction. This book surveys a wide range of major science fiction novels and films from the long 1950s--the period from 1946 to 1964--when the tensions of the Cold War were at their peak. The American science fiction novels and films of this period clearly reflect Cold War anxieties and tensions through their focus on such themes as alien invasion and nuclear holocaust. In this sense, they resemble the observations of social and cultural critics during the same period.

Meanwhile, American science fiction of the long...

Vonnegut belongs to what Emerson called the party of hope but hope clearly restricted to this world. This book is the first scholarly study to discuss all of Vonnegut's novels against the background of his other writing, events of the 20th century, and the vast array of Vonnegut scholarship. In his novels he speaks eloquently and succinctly for his generation of Americans--the central generation of 20th-century Americans--thus making him the representative 20th-century American writer. His novels reflect the major traumatic public and private events that have gone into imagining being an...

The continuing cultural encounters of the Americas, between European and indigenous cultures, and between scientific materialism and premodern supernaturalism, have originated new narrative forms. While supernatural short fiction of the Americas belongs to the broad category of the fantastic, which is generally approached synchronically, reading audiences of the past 200 years have shifted their beliefs about the supernatural several times. While nineteenth-century readers understood science as real and the supernatural as imaginary, modern audiences recognize both as inaccurate, a shift...

The idea of human cloning has fascinated writers and philosophers for centuries and has been dramatized in myths and fiction. This volume traces these fictional illustrations of human cloning from some of the earlier manifestations to more contemporary responses. Using a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective, this book examines parthenogenesis and other related fantasies, and argues that cloning could be an important tool in helping women achieve a more egalitarian status. Ferreira contemplates the new psychological implication for humanity that will arise as a result of the development...

Science fiction occupies a peculiar place in the academic study of literature. For decades, scholars have looked at science fiction with disdain and have criticized it for being inferior to other types of literature. But despite the sentiments of these traditionalists, many works of science fiction engage recognized canonical texts, such as the Odyssey, and many traditionally canonical works contain elements of science fiction. More recently, the canon has been subject to revision, as scholars have deliberately sought to include works that reflect diversity and have participated in...

Although the odyssey has long been recognized as a crucial characteristic of the epic, scant attention has been paid to it as a telling device within other forms of the fantastic. "Fantastic Odysseys" supports the long-held awareness of the odyssey metaphor as an integral function within literary discourse, one that demonstrates a continuum of essential change in human cultural experience. By shifting the focus of that awareness from the epic narrative to a range of other fantastic narratives, this collection challenges critical and literary boundaries while it expands the meaning and...

Though science fiction has existed as a literary genre for well over a century, a working definition of the term has yet to be determined. Ursula K. Le Guin, who emerged as a popular science fiction and fantasy writer in the 1960s, has not only witnessed, but also experienced first-hand the shifts and transformations of this increasingly popular genre. Delve into her fantastical worlds and investigate several of her famous works in this study ideal for high school and undergraduate students. Learn about the author's life and decade-spanning career, as well as her numerous literary...